There are two sorts of medievalists.
To medievalists themselves there are probably far more, but by my reckoning there are essentially two. Actual and neo.
The first are scholars who study the history and culture of the Middle Ages, often becoming medieval in their outlook and even their attire. At university I was briefly taught by such a man whose rooms resembled a hermit’s cell, who dressed as I imagined Piers the Plowman would have dressed, in knee-length woollen tunic and felt hat with throat warmer, and who was rumoured to write medieval fantasies under the name of Carac of Cantabridgia.
I recall him wincing when I mistook a crumhorn leaning against his cobbled wall for a walking stick.
“You mean you can make music out of that?” I marvelled.
For answer he put it to his lips and played me a short piece by Adam de la Halle, otherwise known, he informed me, as Adam the Hunchback.
Did I imagine that he pronounced the word hunchback in a way that made it sound like Jacobson?
I didn’t remain his student for long. I can’t say I was sorry. I had never liked the way he’d looked at me. I didn’t, at the time, know much about Hobbits, but I had a feeling he saw me as one: short of stature, hairy-footed, inclined to fat and living underground.
Then there are the neo-medievalists who, though also given to fantastical allegorising, are not disinterested academic scholars of the medieval world but just happen to feel at home, mentally, spiritually, prejudicially, in the dark ages. Not for them the elves and trolls who demi-people the age of Faerie. The dwarves roaming the fancies of the neo-medievalist are no longer playful or metaphorical but explicitly and unambiguously Hellish and go by such names as Jew, Zionist, Israeli,
To the medieval imagination the Jew was forever at the devil’s side, a fellow conspirator in his desire to discredit Christianity and take over the world. In some accounts he was the devil himself —hence the tail, the horns, and the smell — the foetor Judaicus — that stench of degeneracy, syphilis, garlic and menstruation that was said to follow the Jew wherever he went.
Did I just say ‘menstruation’?
Of the superstitions that have engulfed Jews since the middle ages, here is the most bizarre and yet the most persistent. It originated, like all superstitions, in illiteracy and incomprehension. In this instance, the object of bafflement and fear was circumcision. To the uninformed, circumcision was a species of castration, the effect of which was menstruation without end.
The male Jew was thus at one and the same time made a woman and made murderous —for he had to go in search of new supplies of blood, especially that of young Gentile children whose blood, by a happy chance, was equally efficacious in the preparation of unleavened bread at Passover.
In its essentials, in other words, the Jewish religion found ultimate expression in an act of ritual vampirism performed on non-Jewish children, some of whom, as consequence, became venerated as Christian martyrs.
This monstrous fiction, brewed in the cellarage of ignorance and satisfying that taste for the ghoulish which civilization is meant to dispel, is known as the Blood Libel.
Though the Church has been at pains to repudiate and apologise for this libel, it continues to be given credence, in one form or another, by neo-medievalists to whose political and moral world view it is fundamental. Take for instance the musings of a certain member of the House of Lords who I will allow to remain anonymous for fear the tonguing of her name should crack open Middle Earth and spill forth dragons.
It was she who shall be nameless who wondered whether there might have been any truth in the rumour that Israeli soldiers who assisted in the 2010 Haitian earthquake rescue might have seized the opportunity to harvest the organs of those they were purporting to help. Not saying they did, not saying they didn’t — just wondering.
To wonder is not, of course, to libel. Just as to toss dry sticks onto old embers is not necessarily to mean to start a fire. But keep alive the antique slander that Jews feed on the bodies of non-Jews, and everything they do thereafter will be viewed with the same suspicion and horror. What, for example, might Israeli troops be doing, when no one’s watching, to Palestinians?
Not saying they do, not saying they don’t, just wondering.
The modern medievalist has to be more circumspect than his older self when it comes to dehumanising a people and its faith. You can’t pin the devil’s tail to the Jew any longer. But there’s nothing to stop you waving the tail about and inviting others to pin it, or pinning it yourself on Israel, since not every Jew is an Israeli soldier, nor indeed every Israeli soldier a Jew.
An irrefutably circular logic of blame and abhorrence follows from this. Understand the very creation of Israel as diabolic in ambition and intent, and its every action thereafter will be the devil’s doing. The Jew of the Medieval Mystery Play, calling for the blood of Christ, lives again in Gaza and the West Bank. And so once more, the evil-smelling, merciless thing of darkness that haunted the medieval imagination can haunt ours, though this time on the cheap, without the obloquy that attaches to antisemitism, but fuelling hatred no less irrational.
The same neo-medievalist of whom I’ve spoken, driven by the same itch to get close to the flames of slander without getting her nose burnt, has recently tossed further fuel on the fire.
With an eye, we must assume, to a widely publicised article by the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, expressing the fears many Jews entertained of a Jeremy Corbyn victory in the General Election, she posted the observation— in a spirit she later insisted, that was “light-hearted and not intended to offend”— that “The Chief Rabbi must be dancing in the streets. The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn.”
“Our” election, notice. Not theirs — ours!
Intended to be offensive or not, the image of a portly, sixty-three year old Rabbi, respected for his dignified demeanour, cavorting in vengeful glee at the demise of Corbyn’s labour party, is odious not only in its slander of a religious leader and its parody of legitimate Jewish concerns, but also in its summoning up of a long history of anti-Jewish iconography, from the heartless, hellish Jew of medieval art, at once ragged and rich, to the kitsch figurines and key-rings you can still buy in some European countries, showing religious Jews exulting in diabolic triumph.
In truth, Jewish responses to the General Election result were as mixed as anyone else’s. Yes, there was relief that a party that harboured many a neo-medievalist had not won power. But there was no dancing in any street I frequented. The mood was too sombre. Relief was not a signal for rejoicing. It felt too provisional. A cage had been unlocked . . .
Back among us, whatever the result of the election, was the Jew as foreign agent and conspiracist, plotting with the forces of evil to destroy everything good and influence events in a country that is not even his.
For pact with the forces of evil, read the pro-Israel-lobby; for Jesus read Corbyn; for the mendacious Jew, well, read the mendacious Jew, and you can see how short a distance we have travelled from moral darkness.
Here is why the antisemitism of the modern medievalist should concern us whatever our religion, beyond attacks on Jews on our streets - everybody’s streets — and aside from the fresh libels being scrawled again on shop windows (who was behind 9/11: who do you think was behind 9/11?) this very hour.
All racism is a species not only of unreason but of unreason enthusiastically embraced. We fear what we don’t understand and choose to go on not understanding. Longing to escape from the burden of rationality we leap to fashion judgements with our eyes closed.
And of these exhilarating irrationalities Jew-hating might be the most irrational and exhilarating of all — a brouhaha of infantile conspiracy theory, theological claptrap, medical gibberish, and psychological piffle — dating back to religious mysteries and controversies 2,000 years old, rooted in a cartoon demonology that once explained the world to the uneducated, a thrill to this day to those who like it there, where light never penetrates, in the unending, heart-pounding blackness.
This essay was written for BBC Radio Four’s A Point of View and can be heard here or on the BBC Sounds app
